In my former life in the furniture industry, I had a saying that I frequently used when training sales people: “This business is simple, not easy.” I would often get confused looks in return so I began to explain in more detail as soon as I would spout it off, attempting to motivate new sales people in my class prior to their return back home.
The best business ideas lack complexity: we have X product that costs us Y dollars, we will add our personal brand and value to sell it for Z and make profit. From here we begin to add strategies, vendors, sales processes, customer acquisition, inventory, forecasting, logistics, and more growth oriented components to your business model. However, X, Y, and Z are still the core of your business and will have very little change from Day 1. Where many small businesses fail is their obsession with all the fluff around their core process. Over-complication of a business plan will stop people dead in their tracks because they become overwhelmed with everything outside of their core process and cannot determine what is important and what should be swept aside. Making everything priority level one.
In the furniture business, it was simple: get X product for Y price, use small margins and guerrilla marketing tactics along with a creative sales process and sell it for Z to make a profit. Buy more product and repeat. The marketing was straightforward and low cost so the prices were able to say low and the business encourages repeats and returns. Where that business needs to capitalize on their opportunities is to infuse a level of customer service unseen by any in the industry, something much easier said than done.
Where the confusion comes in for many people is thinking simple is easy… WRONG. Simple means there is no complication and we have a compass that tells us exactly what needs to be done. Once that confusion is out of the way, hard work rears it’s ugly head and we have to grind and dig to repeat that process over and over again to get to that final goal. So many of us get hung up on the planning and the “fluff” around the core concept that we forget how to make things happen: X, Y, and Z. The best businesses cut through the red tape, define X,Y, and Z and work hard every day to get there. Once that core is solidified we can move on to improving them and the other processes previously mentioned, but not until those are stable.
As we all can imagine, this is where many sales people were lost, when I explained the difference in simplicity versus ease. There is a high turnover in the company for sales people, but the ones who embraced the idea of simple, not easy were the ones who worked harder than others and coincidentally succeeded. As managers and leaders we need to look for opportunities to simplify our processes and get to the core of what is important so the people around us have a clear direction and all they have to do is work hard to get it. Problems are rarely solved by adding more to the equation, instead look for what can be taken away to simplify.
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